How to Make Money on LinkedIn with Mark Metry

Today I talk with Mark Metri. He is a bestselling author, a amazing entrepreneur, and the host of one of the top podcasts in the world, Humans 2.0. But the amazing part of this story is we deep dive on LinkedIn and how Mark went from having nothing, no following, no audience, no platform to building one of the most viral audiences in the world on LinkedIn. Specifically, we talk about how you can become the number one voice on LinkedIn in your industry right now. Number two, he talks about and deconstructs the superhero effect and just by adjusting a couple of things in your bio, how you can attract people to want to work with you. Third, he actually goes into exactly how he creates content, what content flow he uses, and how you can mimic the same. And most importantly, he talks about the idea of the psychological promise and how this binds people to you, attracts people to you and wants to make people work with you. LinkedIn is a gold mine and Mark shows you exactly how to do it. So get ready for an insane interview with my friend, Mark Metri. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to, how to go your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharon Tribata and welcome to Business School. So Mark, we can talk about so many things right now because you have been one busy body, but dude, one thing I have to tell you about anything else is congratulations on on actually writing and launching the book, man. How does it feel right now? To be honest with you, man, this whole journey has been so rewarding. Sometimes it's been scary, but it's definitely been weird. Someone who is 22 years old and I'm just trying to live my life and I'm just trying to take advantage of the exponential technology that nobody else has had in human history to help the 12 year old version of myself and talk about things like mental health and transformation and things that are really deep. It's been extremely rewarding, but it's also been super weird. And every single day, I get messages, I get emails, real heartfelt messages of people telling me, hey, I was in your position and when I heard this thing or when you said this, it totally changed how I looked at things. And so this is crazy, man. It feels like I'm just writing my life's story movie in real life action. So yes, it's been crazy to say the least. It's amazing. So screw being shy, learn how to manage social anxiety and be yourself in front of anyone. Mark, Mattry, you did recently one live. When I first, and I'm super grateful that I was a part small, I got a small line in the book. So I'm super grateful for that. The, dude, when I saw the title, when you first shot the precover that you sent me, I was like, first, I was like, wow, how vulnerable does he have to be in this? Because you can't say what you're saying with this title. You can't say it without like digging deep and being vulnerable in a in like a written medium. And that's, that's tough, dude. Yeah, man, it's definitely tough, but I know that these problems in our society, in our world, are just not going to be acknowledged and are not going to be solved if people don't talk about them. And in my book, I talk about where I would have basically a panic attack anytime anybody would try to talk to me. I talk about the times where I would wet the bed all the time, even when I was like a young adult because my body would go into a fight or flight response because I had psychological trauma. I talk about the times where I did things that I'm not proud of that enabled shame to build up in me like stealing from stores way back in the day when I didn't have too much money. And so for me, it's just been like this process of how much can I just sort of flip my guts inside out into the world, at least like in an appropriate manner so that people understand that there are others like them that have these same thoughts. There are other people like them that have gone through these issues. And when I was growing up, I never heard anybody talk about this. And that was a major reason why I didn't get help. That was a major reason why I thought that I was some sort of a moral failure that God or the universe had just sort of created me to just be doomed, not being able to talk to people, never being able to be myself. And so it's like, you can't live with the pain of that and continue to live. Because if you do, then you almost become a statistic and I talk about the times where I was suicidal. And it's just like when you go through that, you have two options. You can either use that pain to fuel and reinvent yourself or you can use it to destroy you and destroy other people and their self-esteem. And so I'm on the side for good. You know, I turn my best every single day. I still have problems. I still have issues. I still have an ego, but it's just like I'm trying to get ahead of it in the most transparent way that I can. Because I know that when I'm like 80 years old, I want to be like, man, I'm so glad I did that when I was 22 and it's helped me build this platform, this legacy that I have today. So I hope it's all meaningful and it's worth it at the end. So hey, listen to the one thing that totally stood out to me was when that's the CEOs that I mentor. I tell them the one thing that completely changes. Everything is, you know, I say don't suffer in silence. And see, there's this amazing quote mark that I had. One of my mentors tell me and he said, our mind is like a bad neighborhood. Don't go in there alone. And that's so it's so crazy when I hear that, right? Like it's totally true because for high achievers, that's literally kind of what you're saying, which is so, which is so amazing. So let me ask you a transitionary question here. So what you did, this brings me to kind of why we're here at business school. What you did was you took, you launched your book. A lot of people say, hey, you know what, I have this message and story to share with the world. I'm going to, I'm going to write this piece of this body of work. And then I'm going to spend the rest of my life promoting it and getting it in the hands of people. But you were able to completely compress that curve because you, whether it was by accident or whether it was by design, you did it in a very thoughtful way, meaning what you did was you launched the book on top of a platform that you had already built where you could instantly after you wrote the book, you were able to get it in the hands of people. You were able to get the message out. And I think a lot, you and I, how many books do you and I know? How many messages do you and I know that are beautiful, well written, but they'll never see the light of day because people just don't have the platform for it. And, and, and, and so many conversations that we've had, you know, you've shared, hey, one of the primary ways in which you really went from zero, actually having nothing from a social presence perspective or a platform perspective to today is LinkedIn. And how you've leveraged that platform. And you literally, you knew nothing about when you when you started, but what I love about it, dude, is, is, Mark is when you the order in which you built this body of work, because I actually don't think that in this short amount of time, you would have been able to reach this many people without that platform. Yeah. No, hands down 100%. Like, I tend to think that the biggest reasons for my professional success are my internal success, first and foremost, obviously, but then also LinkedIn and also my podcast too. And I totally agree with you. You know, like, there's that hope, there's like that whole quote that says, if you build it, they will come. And I think that that might have applied like 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, but the reality is, as like you said, there are so many people out there that have amazing meaningful heartfelt messages, but they're not getting out there. And personally, for me, that's what's enabled me to like make my book a bestseller. I've had people like Dan Pink endorse my book and just like the craziest amount of praise and accolades and numbers in terms of selling and getting this idea out there that there's no way this would have been possible. And, you know, for me, I got on LinkedIn in 2017. You know, I always kind of had LinkedIn. I remember I was in some like tech class in high school and they were like, Hey, you got to make a LinkedIn because it's like how you get a job and you put your resume up there. And I just always kind of use it as that. But I remember in 2017 when I had started my podcast, I interviewed a friend of mine who said, "Oh wait, before we start this podcast, you mind if I post on LinkedIn real quick." And I was like, "Wait, you can post on LinkedIn?" It's up to that time. I didn't know they had a content feed, like Facebook or Instagram. I just thought that it was like this online resume. And I began to look around at it, experimented at it. And the first time actually made a piece of content was this video that I had recorded. And it was this video that was a part of this #Let'sGetHonestInitiative. And this is actually when LinkedIn just came out with video as a feature. Previously, they didn't even have video on the platform. And like this challenge was like, "Hey, just share something that you want to be honest about." And personally, in my own life, at this time, this was maybe about two years after I had kind of fallen down a dark time. I was suicidal. And I was beginning to get ahead of my social anxiety. And I was beginning to manage it in my life. And I just kind of whipped out my webcam's laptop. And I just recorded this video and I said, "Throw my entire life, I've always let social fears dominate me and not enable me to be my real self." And it was just like this minute long video didn't really think twice of it to be honest with you. And I put it up and like a week later, I locked back in. And I don't know. I don't think the stats on the video were crazy. But I just got comments of people that were like CEOs in different business leaders that were like, "Hey, Mark, you're so courageous for sharing this." You know, I have a daughter who struggles with the same thing or it would be some other guy who said, "You know, I also struggle with this too and seeing you kind of share that at your young age gives me hope." But even after that, to be honest with you, I didn't really think twice of LinkedIn. And it wasn't until like the beginning of 2018 where I just had a few of my different mentors tell me to just get on LinkedIn because it was a major, major opportunity. And like the big thing that I learned Sharan is that, you know, Instagram has like what, like a billion monthly users. I don't know what percentage of those people create content. But on LinkedIn, I think there's something like 500 million or 700 million people. And it's like less than 1% of them create content. Wow. It is such a content-deficient platform, obviously now because of people like me talking about it and other people. More influencers on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube are heading on LinkedIn now. And the other big part about it is, you know, obviously I think that every single social media platform has its use. You know, Facebook, Instagram, they're all great. They all have its own use. But the real thing that I absolutely love about LinkedIn and I think that this has made me sort of climb up the professional success ladder much, much faster. It's because the people who are on LinkedIn are decision makers and businesses. They're CEOs. They're people in the business entrepreneurial world, usually 100% of the time. And so, you know, I've been able to collaborate with companies like Amazon, Forbes, like some Fortune 500 companies. It's been mostly all from LinkedIn and it's been showing up there every single day and making content. And now, you know, I think I'm at like 72,000 followers. I've had posts of mine that have gotten millions of views. And it's just completely changed my life. And you know, personally for me, my primary purpose in this world is to help other people achieve a life of mental, emotional, physical, spiritual freedom. And my number two purpose is to help leaders get their own movement started. And I'm super fortunate to have been able to help a ton of leaders, you know, get more serious about LinkedIn because it's just an insane opportunity. And still, not a lot of people are taking advantage of it. So, it's just such a great, great opportunity, man. I'm glad you asked. So, you know, this is awesome. And I, if it's okay with you, I would love to kind of deconstruct or just download your kind of three years. I mean, compress your three years into 30 minutes here because I think that just tactically a lot of people are, you know, I say that they, you know, they have the one question problem, right? And so, that's the problem. And so, I think that's the problem. extremely valuable. And then even ever since LinkedIn got bought out by Microsoft, I believe it was a few years ago, I mean, they've done major changes to the platform. And if you even look at Microsoft as a company, they're all about creating ecosystems. They're all about creating these major platforms where people can grow. And that's exactly what they've been doing on LinkedIn. And so, yeah, the implications of it are definitely, definitely huge. And you know, I'm happy to get into like the tactical 123, but, but I definitely think the point that you said of like that one question, a problem definitely gets people stuck in a lot of the ways. And it can be just be good to just go on that platform, learn more about it, begin to experiment, and really just see that it could be a major, major source of business. Like personally, for me, maybe like 70% of my business comes directly from LinkedIn. And it's all like wake up in the morning, all right, a post and maybe an hour, two hours, three hours passed by. And that post has like 15, 20,000 views. I have like five leads coming from that already. And it's just a massive system for sure, man. Dude, that's so, so, so I went through parts of your course and I wrote down a bunch of questions that, you know, I think from a structural perspective, you know, what I thought was, well, what's stopping somebody, right? I try to get in the head of a few people. So I talked to a few of my private clients and I said, well, what is stopping you? And I have those questions in front of me, which is, I said, hey, I'm talking to like the expert here. So maybe we could deconstruct this. So, so let, let me fire a few tactical stuff at you. Yeah. The first one is, the other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. They are not really, you know, kind of profile bio dependent in any way. You can get by with, with very sparse kind of stuff. You don't have to almost tell the world who you are. Can you talk briefly about, if I were starting out a few things that I need to think about when I'm just crafting that profile and that bio. So I, so I'm actually talking to the right person. Yeah. That's a great question, man. And the reality is, is if you're able to do this, you are already sticking out from 99% of the people on LinkedIn. People on LinkedIn have literally the most generic terrible taglines and and bios. And they're like, you know, I have five years of experience doing this and that the real way to capture people is, you know, what's really interesting is like, for example, on Instagram, right, if you posted something and people are commenting, right, you have maybe I comment, maybe Gary V comments, all you see on Instagram is just my name. But the thing with LinkedIn is when you comment on somebody's post, they have like a little tagline that's below their name. You know, personally for me, it's like bestselling author of my book podcast, yada yada yada. That is a direct spot for you to literally put like a like a mini advertisement, like almost like a little email signature. You could say, I help busy CEOs perform better. I help B2B companies start podcasts. And every time you comment, that's right then and there. And you know, when it comes to kind of like the about the bio of your LinkedIn, obviously, that's a spot for you to talk about your services. That's the spot where maybe you can talk about your experience, maybe any accolades, anything I can give you credibility. But the big thing is what I've learned is if you're able to just like really capture in like the first sentence of your bio page, some interesting aspect of your life, you can get people hooked. So, you know, for me, I say, you know, today I'm a Forbes featured speaker. I'm on Amazon Prime documentary series. But once upon a time, I couldn't even make direct eye contact with anybody. And I suffer from social anxiety. And you know, this is a tip that, you know, a lot of people call this like the superhero effect, where it's like, if you look at any superhero, like Batman, there's usually like a very outwardly facing strength. Everyone kind of knows them for that. But then there's always like this, this double side to it. There's always like maybe like a little bit of a darker side to it. And the reason why that's important on LinkedIn is because LinkedIn is, is I'm just getting better now, but it is too much of a professional platform. It's like overly professional. And so if you can just be honest and you can say, Hey, yeah, I'm really good at, you know, improving your performance. I'm really good at my professional expertise. But I'm also a human, you know, I've also gone through these struggles that immediately lets somebody once take out your profile, and that immediately lets somebody know that you are different than everybody else on this platform. And you're actually a real human being because, you know, sure, one of the problems that LinkedIn has, obviously every, every platform has this, but LinkedIn has guy known for being too spammy. A lot of sales people are on there. A lot of them are sending in-mail messages, like thousands of them without even connecting to you. And so that's like what most of that platform is, or it's like people trying to find a job. But if you're able to separate yourself and you're like, Hey, this is who I am. This is what my brand stands for. This is how I can help you. And this is how I'm a human. Then you are immediately ahead of 99% of the people on LinkedIn. That's so good. I think just the fact knowing that, you know, and the ninja stuff right here was, Hey, when you go comment on someone's post, your little tagline comes up, which is a, which isn't like an amazing, like you said, right? Like a social email signature, which is really powerful. But let's take that to the ninja effect of number two, which I amazing that I wrote this down was, that was not built by accident. The creators of LinkedIn were like, Hey, if now we're actually the reason we're doing that is because now when Sharon comment on Mark's post, Mark gets to see that. So now I'm going to incentivize Sharon to comment more, because now Sharon can go anywhere, comment more. And now it's not just, Hey, someone short like Sharon commented on my post, it was like I see instantly and I associate who what Sharon does. And so and from a commenting, liking commenting, sharing perspective, that's even before we get into content creation. I remember you telling me, Hey, the first thing you need to be doing is just getting engaged and, you know, engage with existing content on the platform. So let's say I have my profile, like you said, I've got the superhero effect. I'm good at blank, but I also have blank kryptonite, right? Like that's really cool. You've got this many advertisement tagline, you've shown a little humanity. Now if I'm, if the next thing that I'm going to do is go start to engage a little bit and get familiar with the platform, what are your suggestions around commenting, sharing and engaging with existing content? Yeah, that's a great question, man. So I have honestly built my podcasts from LinkedIn. And one of the ways that I did that is, you know, I identified people who are really big in the podcast and game who are in my similar industry or my similar niche and they don't respond to comments. And what I mean is I'm, you know, obviously not trying to call people out, but if you look at like major major leaders influencers like Tim Ferris, Gary Vee, Tom Billu, a lot of these people, they kind of run LinkedIn. They kind of have it on like a auto scheduler. They might have someone on their team doing it and they may get an extreme high value or high volume of comments and they just don't respond. And so a major part of my strategy is I will identify five to 10 people on LinkedIn who are already getting engagement on their posts who already have an audience that I want. And I will go in there and leave very, very thoughtful comments that are useful. And the other part of this too is sometimes I'll be scrolling in there and I'll see someone will ask a question to like Gary Vee and they'll say, Hey, you know, should I start a podcast? Should I not? And you go in there and you respond to their question themselves. Now that person who may be interested in the same exact niche or the service that you're offering now knows about you. And like one of the best parts about LinkedIn is this whole kind of network effect. And what I mean by that is if you go to just like your LinkedIn feed, your LinkedIn homepage, you're not just going to see like posts of like people's content, you're going to see people in your network who have commented on other people's posts and have to have them. And what I mean by that is like, you know, probably the first time when I got on the map, so to speak in like the entrepreneurship world was in 2018 and it was after I had interviewed Seth Godin. And it's not just because I had just interviewed Seth Godin and he was just up on my podcast, it was because I made a little micro video snippet and I post it up on there and I tagged Seth Godin. And I don't even think Seth Godin saw that post, but the really interesting part about LinkedIn is if your content, if your post gets enough engagement and you've tagged somebody in it, it is going to automatically pop up in everyone who's connected or follow Seth Godin on LinkedIn at the top of their content feed. And so next thing I know, I've tapped into all of the CEOs, all of the leaders that look up to Seth Godin for business, marketing, for leadership. Now they know who I am. They've seen that post of him and I together and they can make a decision to like comment, maybe follow me, maybe look into more to me. And so yeah, there are like many different layers behind it. But if you can start to identify five to ten people that you really want to engage with, you want their audience and then maybe start to tag them if you can find some way to collaborate with them too, you're going to get literally directly inside of their audience. So that's extremely powerful. >> Dude, that's such a great tip because essentially what you said was let's use someone else's platform to build and serve your message. And I think you and I are very similar where I'm not trying to sell somebody's anything, but I think that people forget that right when we talked about this early on, there's a lot of bodies of work out there that never see light a day. And I think it is our responsibility to make it see light a day. And that's on us. And so what you're saying is, hey, I have a great podcast. I have a great message. I have a great service. And if someone is going to comment on Gary Vee's feed saying, hey, should I start a podcast? And I, Mark Matry, who have built one of the best podcasts in the world, I mean, of 300 plus episodes. Humans to point out is like, I mean, I binge, I binge listen, right? That's like the coolest thing, right? And if you comment on that, there's two things there. One, you're adding value to the person that's asking the question. Two, you have insane credibility around it. And three, if Gary ever saw that, it is the greatest thing for somebody on their own feed to see a discussion happening, like right on my, when I see people on Facebook or Instagram comment on my stuff, and I see other people get involved in that thread. And I don't have to touch it in any way. And I see the community effect. I feel as a, even though it's my platform, I feel super grateful that that's happening. And that I'm able to create that called container for that conversation. And I think what you've just shown is you can actively, you know, I wouldn't say hack it, but you can actively engage with it, which is very, very cool. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And the other thing that I would say too is like, I know personally for me, like if I post a, like a post on Instagram, and it does pretty well for my stats, my audience considering due the amount, the amount of comments of us of like, oh, here of like, hey, I messaged this guy and I got $2,000. So I did a 4x trading thing. I made this amount of money. There's so much that Instagram. Of course, there's going to be spamming on LinkedIn. But with LinkedIn, I see it a lot less. And I just genuinely see kind of like that community effect of people helping other people. And the other part about this to Shiranah's, I've started making like these more community threats. So like, for example, you know, when this whole kind of like COVID-19 thing was just beginning and a lot of people were losing their jobs, a lot of people still are, I was like, you know, hey guys, if you have a business and you're hiring, comment below and you get people engaged like that. And then I made another post that said, you know, hey, do you, do you host a podcast? And do you want to be a guest on podcast? And I created like this mini kind of podcast and marketplace. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's like the real power of it. And yeah, I mean, of course, you could do that on other social media networks. But I feel like the network effects for LinkedIn is just especially powerful for those kinds of things. Awesome. So you went right into it. Let's talk a little bit about content creation. And I think that people kind of, this overwhelms folks a lot. And I think LinkedIn overwhelms people more because it has this aura of extreme professionalism, right? Like I need to have a picture of me in a suit. I need to only say things that, you know, have really good punctuation. I need to only have perfect grammar. There is that kind of, you know, 2015 approach to LinkedIn, which I don't, it's actually, it's gone from being a business networking platform to add a real social platform. Now, can you kind of talk about our people overthinking the fact of, hey, I need to show a very business on this platform. That's number one. And second is, and I'll dig more into like content creation around it. But what are your thoughts around kind of the tone, how you show up and how do you think about that? Yeah, for sure. And I think, I think what you said is spot on and I think it's really evident, like when that whole, like when that whole challenge was going around, that was like, hey, here's your Tinder picture, here's your Facebook picture, here's your LinkedIn picture. And the LinkedIn picture was always much, much more professional. And so I think that kind of conception has definitely had a lot of people shy away from the platform. And I think that's definitely warranted just because the changes that LinkedIn has made over the last few years have definitely been new. But I can say for myself, almost every time the best performing posts that I make are not professional at all. And it's just me being real. And when it comes to content, there's a lot of different things that you can do. If you already make videos on your Instagram, for example, you can put those on LinkedIn and it really shouldn't be a problem. The only thing that I would say is maybe a little bit more unique to LinkedIn is LinkedIn is a much more intellectual platform. And what I mean by that is text, like writing, copy, destroys, it wins on LinkedIn. And that's because people don't necessarily want to see your face versus Instagram. They don't necessarily care if you have a car or a jet. It's just like, hey, what is the information? How can this help me and why is it best? That's why personally for me, I don't really like taking pictures of myself. It's just not my kind of thing. And I'm kind of a more intellectual writing kind of guy. And that's why I think I really do well on LinkedIn. And so if you're able to just spit out the facts, if you're able to just kind of write in not necessarily like a super academic or an intellectual way, just write like a normal copy, try to say as much as possible in these little words, then you'll definitely win. And like, for example, you know, for like just like for your example, Sharon, you know, I see on your Instagram, you have like these super cool, informative posts where you kind of have like a slider and like you break down different tips. And you say like, Hey, number one, do this. Number two, do that. The really interesting part about LinkedIn is they have that feature, but they have it in like this document PDF feature. And so basically what you can do is it acts the same way as Instagram's kind of image slider. But the format of it is a little bit different. You just have to convert it to a PDF. Right. And then just when I post them, those are my best performing posts because it's kind of the best of both worlds. It's a little bit more aesthetic. You can drop in a lot more information because LinkedIn has a 1300 character limit in their text, which is unfortunate compared to like Instagram. I think it has like a 10,000 character limit or something crazy like that. And so it tries to limit you in that way. But if you're able to take that text information and convert that to some sort of a visual sliding piece, that's great because one, it's much more aesthetic. And then number two, whenever, I'm sure this is true for many other social platforms, whenever LinkedIn drops a new feature, they usually try to promote that. They usually try to promote that as much as possible. And they drop this feature maybe like a few months ago or a little bit longer than that. And so like for whatever reason, due to like the algorithm, whenever I make those posts, LinkedIn makes sure that it gets to the top of the algorithm and more people who are following me, who are in my network do that. And so like for if you are like more intellectual, you just want to provide people value, you're not necessarily about the selfies, you're not about, you know, like the random pictures where like Instagram kind of is, it's much more visually appealing. LinkedIn is definitely definitely the spot for you. And yeah, I wish more people like you and Seth Godin would take advantage of it for sure because it's super, super powerful. But the more you can focus on copy, the more you can focus on the text, the information piece, the more that LinkedIn is going to push this. and spread this in the algorithm of like, "Hey, here is just really, really good information. That works." And the second thing that I want to say is, one of the best parts about LinkedIn is that it doesn't care who you are. It doesn't care how many followers you have. And I've had like friends of mine who literally just made LinkedIn accounts and they posted like, "Hey, you know, I just got kind of like my first job at this company. Here are three things that I've learned as like a college intern or whatever." And some of those posts get way more engagement than mine. I've seen like friends of mine who have just gone on LinkedIn, who have like 300 followers, who have gotten hundreds of thousands of views on their posts. And that's because LinkedIn is a marketplace of ideas. If you have the best ideas, the algorithm will push those out. It does not matter how many followers that you have. And so it's like this really equal playing field of just saying like, "Who is the best at this? Who actually has the best content that people engage with the most?" And so versus like maybe Instagram or Facebook where maybe you have to build up a lot of your followers, LinkedIn is not like that. It's very much an equal playing field. - Yeah, so did I totally, I love that. I want to talk a little bit about the followers in a second, but I follow you on LinkedIn. I love your stuff that you've also done in an amazing job of keeping up with the, maybe you're looking at your analytics and keeping up with the trends. I remember you were doing these selfie, oh, just this is regular videos, right? You'd go on a run and you did the video. And I remember you telling me you did the video and it got decent engagement. And then you did the kind of the self-transcription on top of the video. And you said, dude, that just, that totally exponentialized my views on it because people were watching the video with the transcription kind of going on it. Then you gave me the idea where you said, hey, Shron, you've got all these like five, six slider posts just make them a PDF. You've got that, that does really well. But recently I've seen you do a lot more of these, like list, listical posts, right? You know, seven reasons to do this. Eight, you know, seven ways to see consistent posting on LinkedIn. And that stuff seems to just, you know, you have, you have 72,000ish followers right now, which in Instagram world is 17 million. Like it's insane, right? And, but your views on your post are sometimes close to five to 10X, your follower base, which is the very definition of virality, right? Like so essentially I'm saying, all right, I have 72,000 people that this network says I'm connected to, but just the views on my post are 450,000. Like that's, that's, that's amazing. And that itself should get people to pause and stop and say, okay, I'm being given an opportunity here on a very level playing field that I can never, that that Mark and Sharon and Jimmy are all on the same playing field and it's democratized how I can create and reach people. - That's exactly it, man. And, you know, I think the list posts do really well just because of like that straight up kind of valuable information of like, hey, you know, you might be checking your LinkedIn before you go to work at like 8 a.m. Maybe you follow me, maybe you don't, maybe you are following like a specific hashtag in my niche. And when you see those posts and, you know, they've got that, that, that number that kind of instantly provides like that psychological promise to the human brain of like, hey, I'm going to promise you, I'm going to tell you these five things that can help you, you know, I'm not going to take you for a whirlwind, I'm not going to, you know, give you two of them and then say go buy my course to get the rest of them. And so I think it's like that real psychological promise that can get people. - Right. - And then the reality is is like the other part about it too is when you make those list of go posts and you say like, hey, here are seven ways to crush on LinkedIn. And what I always try to do is I always try to make my posts open ended in the sense of I always ask people like, hey, do you agree with this? Do you not agree with this? And let's say you do or you don't, what would be number eight on this list? And so when you do that, you open up the conversation for a lot of people and you get them to engage. And the more engagement you get, the better your posts performs, the better it goes up in the algorithm. But ultimately, if you're able to do that, that's fine. And then also, the other note about this too is with LinkedIn, there are kind of two kinds of audience types. There are your connections and then there are followers. Connections are you go to my profile, you go to your profile and there's a button that says connect. And a lot of the times when you connect with someone, this is LinkedIn's feature of like, now you can message this person, now you can like see like their email address, you can see their contacts, you can see their other connections. And then there are followers. And this happens when you reach the peak connections, which is actually 30,000, I think I'm sitting on like 22 or 23,000 connections. And then now LinkedIn pops up and it gives you a button when people view your profile that says follow. This means that they will see your content in their feed, even if they're not connected to you. And another great way that you can really use this to grow is if you identify like, maybe your ideal clients, the main people you want to get in front of, and you go to their profile and you start engaging with their content, you know day in and day out. And then you send them a connection request and you personalize that, which is super important. And what I mean by that is on LinkedIn, the default is just to connect without a note, but it'll ask you if you want to personalize a note. And basically what that means is if someone is on their phone and they're looking at their connection request, all it is is it just pops up the person's name, their picture, and then that little tagline. And then it says, you want to connect with this person or not. There's a check or there's an X. But if you personalize a note, you literally drop in a message right then and there. And a lot of the times people abuse the crap out of this on LinkedIn. They try to connect with you and they say, hey Mark, I see you're doing good work at, and then they just like have a bot picks the name of your company and they auto fill that in. And they say, hey, I would love it if you want to sign out for our free PDF or hop on a consultation call or something like that. And so again, like if you're able to be authentic and not kind of automate these things or at least not automate them terribly, you're going to immediately stick out and it can get you right in front of people right away. And so that's also another thing to kind of take mind of. So good. So good. So let me ask you a question about follower base for a second. So on, from a following perspective, given the exposure and the virality of the platform, and this can kind of totally bring us home, on a lot of platforms like the other platforms that people are generally used to Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, where you say, hey, I have 100, you know, go, I have a thousand followers and I'm going to probably, if my post gets, you know, if the algorithm is feeling good and my post gets organic reach, I'm never going to get more reach than my follower base, generally speaking, unless I, unless I blow out of, you know, unless I have three, four hundred thousand followers and more. But how important is the follower metric on LinkedIn? Is that a vanity metric? Like if there's a metric that you would actually look at and care about as people are starting to grow and can hone in on a metric that they know that they're doing a good job and they know that they're growing, what, what, what, what metrics would you actually get them to follow? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I have 70,000 followers, but, you know, the reality is, is sometimes my post get 10,000 views. Sometimes I post get a million views. And so we can really just sort of depend, but it's definitely easier to expand the reach, past your number of followers on LinkedIn, just from my own personal experience versus other platforms for sure. But I definitely, I definitely don't think that follower count is the most important thing to look out for. What I would look at is, I would actually look at two different metrics and I would look at these in terms of input versus output. And so what I would say to myself is, how many times am I commenting or like personally for me and like the business that I run, like I have, sometimes I have my assistant commenting and sometimes responding because it can just, the volume of it can be insane. Yeah. But looking at that input of like, hey, can I engage with like 100 people's posts today? Hey, can I send 10 people thoughtful connection requests that's based off the content that they post or the messages that I get from them where they can at least know of me. That's one. And the second one that I would look at is the amount of engagement on your own posts and then as well as the messages that you get. Probably the most important thing about LinkedIn is your inbox. Your LinkedIn inbox is, if you run LinkedIn, right, it is essentially a gold mine. You know, the amount of business that I have gotten from, you know, someone will randomly see my content, they might leave a comment, I'll respond back meaningfully and I'll get a message from them and they'll say, you know, Hey, Mark, I've been following your work for the last seven weeks. I've seen a lot of your posts. You know, I saw that you collaborated with this person. I saw that you do this. You know, actually my company is looking to start a podcast or my company is looking to get more serious about, you know, generating leads online. And you help us. And so I would look at engagement of your own posts, of your own comments and your inbox. Those can be extremely, extremely powerful. And you know, the last thing that I'll say is like, you know, LinkedIn has like a, like a sales navigator, like an end now system where you can search people's positions. You can search them by how long they've been there. You can search them by a lot of different criteria. And that is also a great way to just learn more about people because unfortunately, like, LinkedIn system is not as transparent and robust compared to like Instagram of like, if you search for someone's name on Instagram or if you search for like a hashtag, you'll get it. But sometimes on LinkedIn, that can be a little bit tricky. And so if you're trying to find a specific person, a specific kind of person to target, I would definitely use sales navigator, but I would not go for the immediate pitch. If I could create content instead to appeal to that person and engage with their own content, then they will message you. You don't even have to message them back or you don't have to message them first. And so that's like a major, major way that you can do it for sure. And that can be really, really rewarding on like the business DevSide for sure. So good, man. So I want to wrap up with, so for everybody, I'll post this on LinkedIn, which is my four pages of this from us talking, which is super cool. But I'll link everything in the show notes because you drop some amazing gems. There are three things that the three big pillars of your bodies of work right now that are really impacting a lot of people. I'd love for you to talk about all three. How you have practically done it. There's this LinkedIn course. We have the book, which I'd love for you to talk about where they can get them. And third, my favorite of all, which is your podcast. So if you could just say, hey, those three things, just touch on them that way. I can give people a little context and I'll link everything in the show notes. Yeah, definitely. Number one is LinkedIn. I've got my LinkedIn course. I also do LinkedIn coaching. Number two is I have my podcast acceleration program. And people can check that out just on my website, which is my first and last name, dot com, M-A-R-K, M-E-T-R-Y. And yeah, last but not least, I mean, I'm super passionate about the whole mental wellness side because that's what really digs it because I've had people on my podcast from the co-founder of Netflix to billionaires who have told me they had hundreds of millions of dollars and they were going to kill themselves. And so after me is like the ultimate, ultimate, passionate mind. That's the book, screw being shy. The audiobook will be released soon. And then I'm actually in the middle of taking that book and making it into a course for people who don't necessarily want to read, but want to learn how to like practically do these things at a more interactive level. So yeah, man, that's it. And I appreciate you for having me on, man. It's been honest to see you grow and you're just filled with value and thank you for having me on, man. Hey, listen, as we finish up, I want to tell people this is, it's pretty awesome because in such a short time on this planet, you have created such deep and rich bodies of work that are going to stand the test of time and continue to help people with the course, with the book, with the podcast. I mean, it's so awesome that you've been able to put this all together in such a short amount of time. Like you've done lifetimes worth the work already and the world needs more people like you, Mark. And I'm grateful to call you, friend, man. Thank you so much for being on. Yeah, thank you so much, brother. You're going to crush this podcast. Hey, Sharon, I have a cool gift for you. I took some of my best ideas from the last 20 years and created a five day MBA. It's quick connection pact that you can listen to on the go just like this podcast. And I want to give it to you for free. Just as a thank you for listening to the show. No fluff, no gimmicks, just pure actionable ideas for you to use instantly. You can grab it right now at businessschoolshow.com. That's businessschoolshow.com. [MUSIC]